Borat Guereen
Character Created: 2014/09/27
Corp/Alliance: Chao3/Chao3 Alliance
Website: Chao3
Eve-Who: Link
Eve-O Forum Posts: Link
zKillboard: Link
CSM Watch Interview: English, French
EVE_NT Interview: Link
Introduction VF
This is the time of the year where candidates start throwing their hats in the ring to become part of the next CSM.
I ran last year as a candidate for the Solo play style.
I consider myself a solo player because I do not pay any taxes to any player controlled entity with any of my alts for anything that I do, and I am not receiving any income from any other player except when selling the goods or services I am producing (on my own POSes production lines) , looting the wrecks I can get my ships on, exploring the vastness of New Eden, and the occasional short term loan when needed from one friend or another.
I have found out during the last year that there are many shades of solo, and this term is often used with different meanings for each one of us. There are many other players that I also consider solo, some unknown living their gaming passion in anonymity, others more outspoken about their play style, like Gevlon Goblin or Zosius.
Being solo does not prevent us from interacting with other players in different ways, affecting the meta according to our means, or trying to accomplish some things of significance. Above all, I believe that solo players are not looking to rule over other players and take advantage of other players' game time to fill their own pockets.
My work in my alliance is to help players that have already a few years of experience playing Eve transition from being a cog in a larger machine to achieving their own independence, counting only on themselves, with all the risks that it entails.
As a secretive resistance group, we are waging a war on taxes, and within the Minmatar lore, we are outcasts and freedom fighters, fighting against the oppression of the Amarr Empire. We also fight all the players' alliances, large or small, that are chosing to tax their corp members or wage war on the free circulation of goods in High Sec.
But for CSM XI, I am throwing my hat to represent all guerilla fighters. From lone wolves, as CCP Seagul called us in her latest videocast about the return of expansions, to small groups and gangs that are fighting against larger forces, guerilla warfare is on the rise, with the game moving away from the domination of N+1 fleets.
I am not the best PvP pilot, even if PvP represents 75% of my game time, I am not the best industrialist or market overlord, I am quite simply a random player lambda that chose to stop bending the knee in the past and walked away to establish my own play style, that is not willing to kiss any ring and that got moved to participate to this electoral debate after seeing the influence the established power players wield within the CSM itself, and how this affects the game we all play to their own advantage.
In CSM XI I want to be the voice of the guerilleros, those that can't be bought with ISKs or positions of powers because they are fighting for an ideal that no imperialistic power will ever be able to embrace.
My name is Borat Guereen, and I am candidate for CSM XI.
Here is my campaign's platform.
One term limit for CSM members
The CSM is a group of elected lobbyists representing a faction or a play style. I support only one term for each CSM member, so that every term newer engaged members of the active community can help shape the discussions with CCP on the game we all share. My position has not changed much from last year, except for promoting having one vote per active player, rather than one vote per active account.
Develop exposure to lore in-game while continuing the efforts to support the new players experience better.
Continue developing the new player resources in an integrated way within the game, in line with the work that has been done in the past years, and develop the tools for new players to easily be exposed within the game itself to the latest Scope videos and lore happenings that shape the ongoing non-static storylines.
Encourage new ideas that would facilitate a nomadic life style.
With the introduction of citadels in the game, I’d like to promote having all current POS become Orca-style ships once they run out of fuel or are unanchored. All the POS’s online deployable would be automatically stored in their cargo bay. Such “towering” ship would have the capacity to travel in New Eden like an Orca does. The fuel bay of this ship/POS could only be filled inside a Station or a Citadel, and they could head back to be anchored near a moon and be onlined again. As such, they would become a truly nomadic asset with a built-in limited deployment time before they have to travel back again for refueling. It would allow existing POSes to smoothly transition to a role that is different from Citadels, without becoming extinct, provided the problematic shield can be replaced by the new tethering mechanic.
Support guerilla friendly features.
Guerilla is about wearing down enemies organized in larger numbers, and that have access to overwhelmingly greater forces.
In the same way that sov-holders value control over their region, guerilla tactics must provide a value for the efforts deployed to weaken stronger forces, without becoming overpowered when used by the larger groups themselves. Labeling guerilla tactics as “trolling” is part of their propaganda metagame geared at protecting their influence on the game.
Defend and promote new mechanics that could be effective guerilla tools, like siphons.
Today, siphons are mostly useless because the APIs are ratting them out within hours of their deployment. These are one-use only assets that are fairly costly, and end up totally inefficient to use by small ISK-strapped entities that are unlikely to have any moons themselves, while they are a more useful tool for larger well-funded groups (the opposite of its original design goal). We need to hold CCP to their own statements, and stop having API give out the location of new siphon.
The entosis ban on interceptors is yet another example where the null sec blocks actively work to limit the guerilla capabilities of smaller groups behind their lines. This issue was more about the nullification capabilities of interceptors. Instead of this ban, I would have defended, for example, making HIC bubbles negate nullification around gates.
A last example is the upcoming regeneration of entosis nodes. The existing powers want entosis to strictly be a sov taking feature, and are purposefully negating its potential use as a guerilla tool. I do acknowledge that the concept of regeneration of nodes is needed, but the current rate of regeneration that has been communicated and is to be deployed soon is way too rapid, making any use of entosis as a guerilla tactic useless. I would have lobbied to have this rate apply only to capital systems, and significantly increase the regeneration time according to the distance of the system to the capital system. By linking the regeneration time to distance from capital system, large groups controlling large portion of space would be more affected than smaller groups living in a few systems.
Add some amount of fog-of-war to existing out of game API data, and limit new API sources.
I would actively lobby to limit new API data that would replace in-game activity. API should not be providing too much Out of game information and allow large entities to be managed by relatively small groups of players with the largest out of game technical abilities. I’d also like to introduce some kind of in-game data privacy option. I support consensual watch lists or not seeing the destroyed modules in a kill mail unless the pilot opted in for this information to be publicly available.
Put bridging ships at risk
The capacity to bring in reinforcement by bridging ship to a cyno is a powerful tool against guerilla actions. Larger groups have the advantage of numbers to field stand-by response fleets. To make instantaneously reinforcement become a more difficult tactical choice for anyone using this powerful projection tool, I would lobby to have the bridging ship jump to the location with the bridged fleet once the bridge closes, without the possibility to prevent that jump.
Allow capital ships to cyno to any system’s sun in range.
The ability for all capitals to jump to a cyno is highly dependent of good cyno beacon infrastructures or cyno alts. For the more casual players that can’t afford multiple accounts, or the smaller groups, the use of capitals is limited by this lack of infrastructure. I would promote allowing capitals to jump to sun in systems in range (unless they are cyno-jammed), and prevent deploying any citadel within less than 1 AU from a system’s sun.
Require that all players link all their alts publicly, with a slight change in the EULA, and remove the character bazaar.
There are some activities in Eve that do not yet fit into the risk versus reward model that is widely accepted as being core to Eve game design. Cloaky campers, infiltrated spies or destabilizing agents using anonymous alts are activities with high potential rewards and little risks. They favor power players with the means to maintain multiple accounts.
Anonymous alts may have been a good thing for the past decade, but it may be time to examine how this affect the more recent players. Any rising group can be easily infiltrated, and is never going to evolve anymore beyond being a “farming” ground for the bigger groups, or will implode from being destabilized from inside to the profit of the already established groups that can keep their hand in all the pies all the same time with anonymous alts.
The game should allow new entities to grow with players whose in-game experience and loyalties can be established with their pilot’s histories and the influence that each player can wield is made visible by linking together all their alts publicly, after giving current players a chance to choose the alts they will chose to keep to represent their in-game experience going forward. I do support making Skill Points another commodity through the recently announced transneural packages, and I would also lobby once this feature is implemented to remove the character bazaar entirely, so that all pilots history and name remain tied to the player that created them in the first place.
In its first decade, Eve online was a wild west where dreams of empires were achievable. The mechanic of the game so far has encouraged players to join larger groups to find security in numbers and organization. Still, the domination of N+1 fleet has been correctly identified as a problem for the game, and the stagnation of null sec has been called out as an issue. This second decade must be the age of revolutions, and the game must offer mechanics that can threaten established alliances, forcing the largest groups into actively defending their territories, or become splintered. It should also prevent hidden influences by established power players protecting their personal interests. There are no revolution without the ability to wage effective guerilla warfare, and the CSM needs voices that can lobby to make sure features that are designed to be guerilla friendly do not end up being nerfed to uselessness to protect established interests.